Friday, 31 January 2014

I
drove out of Sheffield, absently noting the supplicatory paw marks on West Side Story and a lone sentinel
perched atop Buttonhook. The serried
buttresses of Stanage were drenched with shadow. So many shared images linking
us to the core of things. My thoughts wandered across the Donegal and Connemara
highlands of 40 years ago, a time that, but for a few, is time out of mind. And
thus to the man whom I was driving to meet, an enigmatic figure who has always
intrigued me, a man, heaven help us, almost old enough to be my father.

Harold
Drasdo was born in 1930. He has climbed for over 50 years. A former Bradford
Boy and habitué of Wall End Barn, he is
of the Brown-Whillans generation. His route, North Crag Eliminate, is one of the great Lake District Extremes. With
Bob Downes, he made the second ascent of Spillikin
Ridge, then the hardest and most famous route in Ireland. In the Lakes, he
wrote the 1959 Eastern Crags guide
and in Wales the guide to Lliwedd. His monograph Education and the Mountain Centres was an early and important
critique of the Outdoor Education movement. With Michael Tobias, he co-edited The Mountain Spirit, an eclectic array
of essays on aesthetic, cultural and spiritual responses to mountains. Now he
has produced The Ordinary Route, part
autobiography, part polemic. What are we to make of him, of it?

The
first thing that must be said is that The
Ordinary Route is very, very good indeed. Drasdo is a wordsmith who takes
his craft seriously. Not for him the verbal pyrotechnic, the slipshod metaphor,
the populist sentiment. Keep at it for 50 years and you too may learn to write
like this. And yet Drasdo has previously been panned by the critics and
resolutely condemned to literary extinction. Remain part of the awkward brigade
and you too will merit the throwaway verdict of history!

Harold Drasdo leading the first ascent of Left Aisle on Arenig Fawr-14/5/96.

Time
and time again The Ordinary Route
reveals Drasdo as a consummate master of the felicitous phrase. Traditional
guidebooks are sacred books, linking armchair and crag. Maps induce a dreamlike
pleasure, are a poem without beginning or end. The remote fastness of Ogden
Clough, archetypal grit outcrop, is a neat little arrangement of rocks, rimming
its tight ravine. The cascades of Sour Milk Gill thunder powerfully and
creamily down the slabs opposite Seathwaite Farm. The sing-songs of his
post-war travelling companions are the poetry of the poor. Girls a little older
than himself and tantalisingly inaccessible, defeat the austerity of rationing
to make style out of rags.

At
Gorphwysfa, the resting place, he has his conversion. Beneath him, the
Llanberis Pass is shafted through with evening light and drenched with astonishing
colours: golds, greens, purples, black. Three men stride abreast, sturdy booted
figures in worn clothes, two carrying coiled ropes over their shoulders. He
senses the justice of their claim to this place. All around him, the hills
recline in sensuous invitation. He is 17 and he has wasted his life. For the
next half-century, climbing will be a consuming passion.

Characteristically
Drasdo is diffident, indeed almost dismissive, about what must have been a
precocious climbing ability. The then highly serious North Crag Eliminate, done with an underfed, streetwise 14-year-old
called Dennis Gray, is seemingly flawed by the necessary abseil removal of a
loose block. A slip from the sloping finishing hold of Short Circuit at Ilkley costs him the first ascent of arguably the
most technical route in the country. A casual exploration on Dove Crag
anticipates the sustained seriousness of Mordor.
At Kilnsey, with the swell of field surging against the cliff, he makes a
futuristic ascent. Gallows Route is
very nearly aptly named. Yet only with his gargantuan routes in the Poisoned
Glen is there a sense of enduring satisfaction.

Jac Codi Baw, The Amphitheatre, Arenig Fawr -1st ascent 29/7/97

The
rite of passage of the ferry crossing returns him to a land impregnated with
Yeatsian lyricism and the beautifully cadenced speech of the far west, an
empty, depopulated land where the hills are robed with mystery. Drasdo and his
companions fall deeply, blindly, helplessly under the spell of Donegal. Forever
afterwards, the valley of his dreams will bear a confused resemblance to the
Poisoned Glen, redolent with a haunting sense of unrealised possibilities.

The
concomitant to mountaineering is companionship upon the hills. Such
companionship may be real or vicarious. The famous, the unknown and the half-forgotten
flit wraithlike through Drasdo’s pages. Abraham, Westmorland, Kelly, Dolphin,
Greenwood, Marshall, Austin, Brown, Harris, Anthoine, make a curve like an
arrowflight, spanning a century and more. To Irish climbers, the names of André
Kopczynski, Ruth Ohrtmann, Peter Kenny, Frank Winder and Betty Healy are no
whit less hallowed.

A young HD on Eagle Crag in Grisedale

Drasdo’s
Lliwedd travails compel him to follow in the nail marks of Archer Thompson and
Menlove Edwards, both of whom terminated sad, desperate lives through
self-poisoning. He knows well that man’s days are as grass; for many, climbing
is a fire which will burn out; the futility of retracing the past inexorably
impales one upon a spear of grief.

And
yet ultimately all of this is as nothing when set against mountaineering’s
epiphanies. Middlefell Buttress is frescoed with rondels of bright green
lichen. Empty, mysterious foothills bar the way to Arcadia. The sacred monastery
of Saint Catherine, with one of the most eminent collections of ancient
manuscripts on earth, stares out across a great and terrible wilderness, the
land-bridge between Africa and Asia. Montserrat yields a perfect echo, an
ineffable melody, Donegal a double moonbow, its immaculate white arches high
and complete. By Gibraltar, a tangle of jet black snakes basks in the sun. At
Corrour Bothy, after struggling through seemingly endless snowdrifts in the
Lairig Ghru, exhausted mountaineers sink into deep dry beds of soft heather. In
the Rifugio Lavaredo there is supper by candlelight, with sheet lightning
flashing outside. An unruffled sea stretches across to Wicklow Head, while
behind, the tiny but shapely hills of Lleyn lead up to the Rivals and above and
beyond them to the mysterious heights of Eryri. The remote and uninhabited head
of Glen Barra calls to us across space and time. There is a day on the Ordinary Route on the Idwal Slabs when,
magnificently, huge soft snowflakes fall vertically in an absolute stillness
and one is unexpectedly swept with happiness.

In
her evocative Western Interlude,
written about Glen Inagh in Connemara, published in the Ronnie Wathen edited Irish Mountaineering 1958/59 and quoted
by Drasdo, Brighid Hardiman glimpsed a psychic frontier:

‘The mountains were quiet and
unchanged, affected neither by our coming nor our going and I wished that there
was some part of them that would miss us as we would miss them. But they were
the ones who laid claim and remained untouched...’

With
The Ordinary Route, Drasdo reveals
the quotidian as strange and numinous. He spirits us across Brighid Hardiman’s
psychic frontier. One of the Wild Geese has finally come home.

Friday, 24 January 2014

It must have been that fascination, overmastering and
fatal as was ever the blindness that took Pentheus to his doom among the
Bacchae, which led me once to the steepest cliff in Wales. The sense of
intimacy that possesses the solitary had become, it may be, an infatuation;
more and more I had thought that I might presume, if my love be kind, until it
seemed that there was no liberty that I could not take. It was a May morning of
1942, and I was under the precipice of Clogwyn du'r Arddu. I had stepped from bright
sun into the slanting shadow of the eastern buttress. I blinked up at it, at
the row of vertical cracks that split it.

On the right I could see the Curving
Crack that Colin Kirkus, I knew, had climbed with Alf Bridge. The day was warm,
the rocks dry, and the moss peeled from them under a rubber shoe. I started up
the first layback crack; why, I could not tell. There was no sense in trying
such a climb. I was tasting simply a physical pleasure — why does the small boy
buy an ice cream when he has pennies about him? My legs were arched, feet
pressed against the back wall. The rubbers slipped occasion­ally, ever so
slightly. My fingers hooked around the upright crack edge. I was gaining
height, slowly. At the top of the first section, 30ft, above the turf, I
surveyed future and past: the vertical walls of the buttress and the little
ledge on which I stood.

A comforting crack split the cliff above me, shaped
exactly for the wedging of a human body. But it must be hard; if I could not go
on, could I go back? The climber has his lesser Rubicons. I knew that
infatuation was upon me; that I could not break this spell of movement,of tense
wonder at my physical doing. I must go on, to watch body and mind working in
their own right together. Now in self-defence, I must give of the best: a poor
kind of best, perhaps, if you could catalogue 'bests', but one that would
satisfy me for a day. The crack ahead must be a struggle; again, could I get
down, was I doomed to crouch like a sheep stranded on its tuft, waiting till I
starve or fall? And would it not be a pity so to fall, to end in a moment this
bundle of nerve and muscle, of action begun and hope for things incomplete?

I wrestled hotly to the top of the Curving Crack, in a
fear and a sure vowing that I could never be guilty of the like rashness again.
On the grass above, I lay in the sun. I had done — what? I had done something
that only I could tell. Something foolish, something that I must not repeat,
but something that I felt still to have been worth' the doing. And I could no
more simplify the climb into an idiocy than into a conquest; there was more to
it than that, as there must be more to any hard effort in which mind and body
have combined to give. And yet if it must be set down as the one or the other,
idiocy it certainly had been, and conquest never. I had by no fragment, other
than the trampled grass or displaced chockstone, altered the life of that
cliff.

I had been allowed to scramble, a short and precarious hour, over its
bare rock. I had no more conquered it than the Lilliputians conquered Gulliver,
when they first walked across his chest.

Saturday, 18 January 2014

Mostpeople involved
in UK mountaineering know the Andy Cave story. The gauche young collier from
South Yorkshire who found himself ‘learning to breathe’ and discovered that the
sweetest, cleanest air of all was to be found in the mountains! With the
mining industry on the verge of tipping into catastrophic politically
engineered decline, he chose the perfect moment to get out of the industryand pursue the life of the itinerant crag
rat. Building up an impressive Alpine CV before cashing in his Coal Board
pension to fund three simultaneous Himalayan adventures.

It was a steep and
rapid learning curve which propelled the young tyke into the upper echelons of
UK mountaineering and cemented his reputation as a cool and solid performer
under pressure.Andy’s aforementioned
award winning autobiography and his ascent from the pit head to the mountain
heights, draws parallelswith another
northern coal mining climber, Bill Peascod, whose inspirational story is recountered in his beautiful autobiography, ‘Journey After Dawn’. However,
whilePeascod remained
a parochial climber,essentially fixed in his north Cumbrian fiefdom, Andy Cave found the challenges of
the Alps and Greater Ranges more to his
liking. Establishing cutting edge routes including his famous epic ascent of the north
face of Changabang with Brendan Murphy.

In Paul Diffley’s latest film, Distilled, 'Learning to
Breathe' has essentially been reprized into a 42 minute film biography of Andy’s
climbing life. Using the dramatic backdrop of Scottish Highland cliffs in their
finest winter raimentto frame Andy’s
narration. Presumably filmed in the 2012-13 winter season, these great vertical
snow and ice palaces have never looked more enticing or dramatic. A great
monochromatic playground where the only the splash of colour and movement is
provided by the climbers.

Kicking off on Waterfall Gully on The Ben, Andy and his
partner Gary Kinsey, work their way through various classic winter climbs
including The Curtain, Deep Throat and Tower Ridge, with Andy himself narrating
his life and times, as lost in a lonely, spindrift, ice tinkling vortex, he effortlessly picks his way through some unlikely
looking terrain. Credit to the
camera team who must have shivered in their winter apparel filming these
scenes. At least Andy and Co could keep moving to keep warm.

Rather incongruously, there is a brief passage showing Andy
soloing Fern Hill atCratliffe Tor in summer conditions.
Given that the main meat of the film surrounds Andy in his Scottish winter
element then I wondered if perhaps this could have been dropped altogether with
the action footage just concentrating on his winter ascents? On the other hand,
perhaps the film could have included more pure rock climbing with interviews added
to extend the running time ?There
may have been logistical reasons for this however and it doesn’treally detract that much from the end
product.

As with all the Hot Aches films I’ve seen so far, the sound
and footage is pin sharp; the editing is spot on and all in all it’s a fine
piece of work from one of our most creative outdoor film outfits. No surprises
then that it won the coveted ‘People’s Choice’ award at the recent Kendal
festival.

Friday, 10 January 2014

History records that 1950’s English climbers were the first
to use what we recognize today as the ubiquitous nut as a means of protection
when lead climbing.Using drilled machine nuts, northern climbers like Jack
Soper, Joe Brown and Don Whillans, had extended and improved the practice of
inserting pebbles in cracks to provide a running belay, by carrying a selection
of engineering nuts of different sizes threaded on thin hawser cord.

By the early 60’s, climbers like John Brailsford saw the commercial potential and developed ‘The Acorn’; the first
climbing nut that was produced and marketed as climbing protection.Brailsford
very soon had improved the design and gave the climbing world, the legendary
Moac. However,evidence unearthed several years ago by north Wales climberKen
Latham, suggests that the modern climbing nut- as we know it- was developed in
North Wales as far back as 1946. Its inventor being one Scotty/ie Dwyer. A
minor figure in the world of North Wales climbing but someone who was
responsible for several classic first ascents including one of the regions
great VS climbs;the superb 400’ mountaineering route, Central Route on Llech
Ddu in the Carneddau.

Put up in the same year(1946)as his remarkably
modernistic sliding nut was developed. Another Dwyer route is Excalibur, a two
star esoteric outing above the beautiful lake of Llyn Gwynant.In the 90’s I named
and claimed it as a first ascent,only to discover that Scotty Dwyer had
climbed it back in 1965. The little crags hereabouts abound with unclaimed SD routes
which he had put up while working as an instructor in a local outdoor education
centre. The link at the foot of the page detailing the history of the climbing
nut, mentions ‘the Scottie’ but let Ken
Latham himself explain how the climbing nut was first created in North Wales.

During the summer of 1972, I was managing the Ellis
Brigham shop in Capel Curig. On the staff at that time was George 'Scottie'
Dwyer. I can't remember now if he was just helping out as a favour, or working
there on a regular basis; but from what I recall, he was retired from guiding
and just came in to sort out the hire equipment. He hadn't climbed for many
years. Indeed, a hip replacement had curtailed his
mountaineering activities some­what (remember in those days, hip jobs really
were a bit of a nut and bolt affair).

It was during a quiet day that we got talking.
Generally, he kept him­self to himself most of the time, so it was a real bonus
when he came through to the rear of the shop, carrying a couple of brews and
began telling stories of his exploits. Some of the expeditions in the forties
and fifties, driving overland to the Himalaya, seemed fantastical: encounters
with hoods and bandits were commonplace. He also talked about his climbing in
this coun­try and of course, his first ascent of Central Route on Llech Ddu.

As the day wore on and Scottie became more forthright,
he handed me a metal wedge on a thin piece of line. He seemed to hold back as I
examined this crude bit of gear, but asked me for my thoughts about it. I was
used to Moac and Clog wedges that were then on the market and I remember being
fairly unimpressed at first. It was only a while later that this encounter took
on a special significance. Scottie told me he had been working on some ideas
for protection devices for rock-climbing, but did not have the means to get
them made up. The nut he showed me was a rough mock-up of one he had made in
1946. I was astounded.. He said that he had never used it on a climb and was
unsure of its holding properties. The line available then was hemp and would in
all probability not have withstood the stress of a leader fall. Scottie told me
he had re-discovered the nut as he was clearing out some old equipment and had
promptly forgotten about it. He asked me to keep it as he had no use for it
anymore. I returned to Liverpool and sadly, Scottie died soon after, while
still only in his sixties.

The remarkably modernistic 'Scottie' from 1946.Photo Ken Latham

Almost twenty five years later I was having what
everyone will recog­nise as one of those loft-cleaning sessions in which
everything must go, when I came across a long forgotten 'sack. Rummaging
through the gear it contained — Moacs, Leeper pegs and Peck runners — I found
the 'Scottie' nut.. I considered what to do with it. Reluctant to show it
around at first, though interested to find if anyone could shed light on other
bits of its history, I took it to the CC Centenary Dinner. Many eminent members
looked at it, and when they heard its story, commented that it seemed entirely
possible it did indeed originate in the year Scottie claimed. It may well be
that Scottie couldn't countenance introducing such a piece of equipment in the
1940s; it would no doubt have been seen as unethical. Then he mislaid or forgot
about it for years until he told me about it.

If Scottie had found a maker for his nut in the 40s
and launched it on the growing market, who could say how the history of British
rock- climb­ing would read today? The design — combining variable, sliding
camming and multi-faceted placement — was at least fifteen years ahead of its
time. I showed it to Joe Brown recently and he was convinced of its
authenticity; he also commented that he hadn't used any machined nuts himself
until about 1961, as he thought they were unethical. Slings on pebbles were
still In widespread use.

If anyone can throw more light on this unique nut —
which I'll continue to call the 'Scottie'--- I'd be delighted to hear from you.

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To Hatch a Crow

Welcome to footless crow- Croeso i Bran di-droed

Footless Crow aims to provide the best in British outdoor writing in a unique 'blogazine' format. Offering new articles and republishing classic articles from the past which have been cherry picked from UK climbing/outdoor magazines and club journals. In this I am pleased to have received the support of many of the UK's top outdoor writers who see Footless Crow as a perfect medium to air unpublished works and see old works republished in a format which was inconceivable when they were first written!As a non commercial media,the blogazine acknowledges the contribution that publications like Loose Scree and The Angry Corrie have made in the world of mountain literature. Providing accessible quality writing through a low cost 'zine' format. Footless Crow hopes to emulate these publications by also providing content which is unashamedly traditional and celebrates the finest virtues of British mountaineering!

All published works and photographs have been fully approved by the authors who of course retain copyright. The usual rules and restrictions of copyright apply.Hope you enjoy the content which aims to provide a new extended article each week. If you have any comments or would like to contribute something which fits in with the 'Footless' concept then email me at ......

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Why 'Footless Crow' ?

Footless Crow is a seminal rock climb in the Lake District of Northern England. It was the creation of legendary British climber Pete Livesey-1943-1998. Livesey was one of the new breed of climbers who eschewed the traditional laid back, fags and booze, ethic prevalent at the time and instead pursued a rigid training regime designed to increase his physical and mental attributes to the extent that he could push British climbing to new technical standards. In effect he was one of the first UK rock athletes.Footless Crow was a breakthrough climb which at the time was the hardest climb in the Lakes at E5-6c (US 5-13a). Currently E6-6c due to a flake peeling off.First climbed as an aid route by 50's Lakes legend, Paul Ross and then called -The Great Buttress-. Livesey's much rehearsed test piece was finally led on the 19th April,1974 to the wide eyed astonishment of the UK climbing community. One well known climber was said to have hung up his climbing boots after witnessing the ascent !The name Footless Crow was a brilliant piece of imagination from Livesey who claimed that as there was almost nowhere on the route where he could rest he had to hop about like a footless crow.

So now you know.

In 1976 I saw Ron Fawcett, rock-master since the middle Seventies, on the second ascent of Footless Crow in Borrowdale, then the hardest climb in the Lake District – 190 feet of overhanging rock without a resting-place. When his second called up, ‘What’s it like?’ he answered, ‘An ’orrendous place – Ah’m scared out of me wits,’ as he leaned way back on his fingertips, relaxing as comfortably as a sloth under a branch.